One of the most controversial figures of the 1980s, Jim Bakker has passed away.
The televangelist, who was once watched by millions, was 86 years old.
Jim Bakker: 1940-2026
His wife, Lori Bakker, announced his passing in an Instagram post, but did not share details regarding his cause of death.
“It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening,” she wrote in the caption.
Bakker’s son, Jay Bakker, confirmed his father’s death in a Facebook post.
“Hello everyone, my father passed away today and it’s very difficult,” he wrote. “We had a very complicated relationship and he was also my father and a grandfather and I need to mourn in my own time.”
A Television Powerhouse
Alongside wife Tammy Faye, Bakker utilized the power of television to built a TV ministry dubbed PTL, which they launched in 1974. Over the course of the next decade, the couple became ubiquitous on television; at their peak, the Bakkers’ TV show was watched by an audience of 13 million viewers each night.
During its 1980s heyday, the PTL media empire — which included a theme park — reportedly raked in more than $125 million per year, making the Bakkers staggeringly wealthy.
It all came tumbling down when Bakker become caught up in a sex scandal involving church secretary Jessica Hahn. Hahn wound up parlaying her notoriety into a certain degree of fame, appearing regularly on “The Howard Stern Show,” posing nude for Playboy and briefly dating comedian Sam Kinison.
Bakker resigned from PTL in disgrace in 1987, but the worst was yet to come.
Two years later, he was hit with federal fraud charges that led him to receive a 45-year prison sentence.
After serving nearly five years in a federal prison, Bakker was released in 1994. He eventually resumed his television ministry — albeit on a far smaller scale than before.
Tammy Faye filed for divorce during his imprisonment, and went on to become a celebrity in her own right until her passing in 2007 at age 65.
‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’
The Bakkers’ rise and fall was dramatized in the 2021 feature film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”
Bakker was portrayed by Andrew Garfield, with his wife played by Jessica Chastain.
Chastain’s performance in the film won her the Best Actress Oscar.
A New Ministry
After his release from prison, Bakker appeared repentant; his 1996 memoir was titled “I Was Wrong.”
During a 2000 appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Bakker admitted he was “embarrassed” by the man he used to be, insisting that what he’d been through had placed him on a righteous path.
“I’m put back together by my faith in Jesus Christ,” Bakker said. “He forgives everyone. And if I don’t receive his forgiveness, how can I teach anyone else that God will forgive them?”
However, two decades later Bakker encountered controversy again. During a television broadcast in February 2020, Bakker and a guest claimed that Silver Solution, a product made from colloidal silver, could rid the body of COVID-19
That landed him in hot water with the Missouri Attorney General’s office, which issued a statement declaring, “Anyone who has bought ‘Silver Solution’ from ‘The Jim Bakker Show’ should know that it cannot cure or treat coronavirus.”
In the years after that, Bakker and wife Lori continued to host “The Jim Bakker Show.” This show, however, represented a shift away from the “prosperity gospel” message of his PTL days, and instead focused on selling products geared toward end-times survivalism, such as freeze-dried food buckets and water filtration systems.
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Televangelist Jim Bakker Has Passed Away at 86